Museum of Modern Art

It’s quite a surprise that a film titled Pinochet Porn depicts a tender portrait of friendship. Granted, Ellen Cantor’s final film buries that theme under a shocking mélange of spank-heavy sex scenes, depressed clowns, descriptions of rape and torture over vintage Pepsi ads and disturbing archival footage of the Pinochet dictatorship, Hitler and September 11th. But looking beyond its violent and erotic imagery, the film is a celebration of a close-knit avant-garde community.

This became clear at the film’s premiere at MoMA on Monday night, part of the museum’s Modern Mondays film program. Playing to a sold-out theater, the screening also featured a post-film discussion between the Museum’s Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art Stuart Comer, Participant Inc.’s founding director Lia Gangitano, who appears in the film, and filmmaker John Brattin, who acted as Director of Photography. While this is common with MoMA’s screenings, it seemed particularly important on Monday. Firsthand accounts of the film’s production and posthumous completion, provided here by Gangitano and Brattin, seem irrevocably intertwined with any analysis or enjoyment of the film itself.

The art world must have speculative fiction on the brain. The week starts with a discussion of the art of 2050 and continues with art about the seen and unseen (“the unknown” is a pervasive theme this week). There’s also a lot having to do with data: the good, the bad, and the ugly—depending on how you feel about infographics.

We’re still flying by on September’s openings, but by the time the weekend rolls around, we’re gonna see some signs of new art life. Throughout the week, there’s a heckuva bunch of artist talks and lectures. We just might jump out of our panda costumes to attend a few. By the time the weekend rolls around though, we’ll have some hard choices to make. Pandacam re-enactments or Mike Kelley’s behemoth retrospective at PS1, Rollin Leonard’s solo show of cut up digital bodies, or Robert Longo’s Patsy Cline cover band reuniting at The Kitchen. Only time will tell whether the government’s shutdown has greater effects on the art world than anyone could have predicted.

After 43 years, Barbara London is leaving MoMA on October first. Over the course of her career as associate curator of Media and Performance Art, she has guided us over the expanding landscape of new media.

Her career began in the 70s when she founded the museum’s video collection, introducing works by Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, and Lynda Benglis. Over the years, she has consistently exhibited new work by Chinese and Japanese artists and pioneered Internet art at MoMA: in 2001 she produced the museum’s first website art commission, Tony Oursler’s Timestream, and in 1997 created Stir-Fry, a multimedia site mapping emerging media art in China. London has made a career of championing media and sound art, forms that continue to pose institutional challenges.

Did you beach too hard and forget to read this summer? Fear not, art lovers, for we bring you the second annual AFC Best of Summer list. We’ve brought together the blog’s greatest summer hits from staff and contributors, because, let’s face it, you might have missed out on days or weeks of AFC when you were traveling to Venice, Basel, or closer to home, the Rockaways. We’ve published some great artist essays with our STUFF series, started our “Diary of a Mad Gallery Owner” series, and continued to bring you reviews and opinion pieces. Enjoy.

This week at The L Magazine, I finally end the discussion of whether video games are art by declaring: “Yeah, sure, okay.” Have something to add? Too late. But more importantly: why’s it such a big deal?

Tonight at 6 PM, Sotheby’s art handlers will protest outside of MoMA. Why protest? Because they’ve been locked out of their jobs for 8 months, while Sotheby’s continues to prolong contract negotiations. After multiple concessions and attempts to compromise, the teamsters maintain the request that Sotheby’s continues to hire union workers when its current staff retires.